Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
ABSTRACT: Buried in the Stanford University Archives is an undated anonymous pamphlet entitled "The Legend of Pancho Sanchez," which offers a Catholic critique of the Bracero Program. This article puts "Legend" and its vision of the program in conversation with the church's late 1950s/early-1960s position on agriculture and its longstanding advocacy for family-based, owner-operated farms as the centerpiece of morally healthy agricultural production. I contend that the church's deep commitment to small farms as key to a healthy society shaped its hesitancy to rethink this priority, despite shifting migration patterns and increased prevalence of migrant farmworkers, domestic and non-. "Legend" suggests that official church priority could not see how the structural underpinnings of industrial agriculture affected in interrelated ways domestic farmworkers and Mexican braceros alike, exacerbating the precarity of all farmworkers.
Déborah Cohen (Fri,) studied this question.